How Lidar Makers are Coping with Slow Progress of Self-Driving Tech
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 2020 Consumer Electronics Show was absolutely crawling with companies hawking lidar. Short for light radar (yes, really), this powerful type of sensor generates a three-dimensional pointcloud of its surroundings. Experts and industry insiders not named Elon Musk see it as a key technology for self-driving cars. There are dozens of companies developing lidar technology, and each insists that its sensor is a cut above the rest.
But while every lidar is above-average in the halls of CES, things are starting to look different in the real world. At least one segment of the market-custom robots for warehouses, mines, and other industrial sites-is starting to buy lidar sensors in significant volume. Another segment-low-end lidars used in car driver-assistance systems-is poised to become a big market in the next couple of years.
For this piece I asked both lidar company officials and independent experts to help me understand the state of the lidar market. They told me that Velodyne-the company that invented modern three-dimensional lidar more than a decade ago-continues to dominate the industry.
But Velodyne is facing growing competition from newer firms. One company in particular-Ouster-has begun shipping aggressively priced alternatives to Velodyne's flagship products. While these products might not quite match Velodyne's performance, they're good enough and cheap enough to pose a serious threat to Velodyne's dominance.
The big battles in the lidar market are still in the future. A lot of lidar sales so far have come outside of the automotive industry, but experts expect carmakers to be the biggest customers for lidar. In the next few years, we're going to see a number of carmakers make their first bulk lidar purchases-buying thousands of low-cost lidar sensors to improve their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). A number of lidar companies are positioning themselves to win these deals, and some are pairing up with traditional "tier 1" automotive suppliers to improve their odds.
The industry's biggest prize may be supplying more powerful lidar sensors for use in fully self-driving vehicles. Many companies are angling to serve this market, but those sales are still quite a way off because fully self-driving technology isn't yet ready for prime time.
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